How many contemporary Catholics (to say nothing of ordinary Americans) know the name Gordon Zahn? In this absorbing biography, Benjamin T. Peters endeavors to demonstrate that Zahn “made one of the most intellectually developed cases for Catholic pacifism—terms that both Catholics and pacifists often regarded as contradictory.” Indeed, when a young Zahn applied for conscientious-objector status in 1941, a draft-board priest told him that Catholics couldn’t be conscientious objectors. By the time of his death in 2007, Peters writes, Zahn had helped shift the thinking on pacifism—largely by sharing the story of Austrian martyr Franz Jägerstätter, but also through his “peace lobbying” at Vatican II and essays in publications like Commonweal. Perhaps his legacy is at work amid revived debates over just-war theory and claims that there may be no such thing as “just war” at all.
Catholic Pacifist
The Long and Lonely Quest of Gordon Zahn
Benjamin T. Peters
Catholic University of America Press
$29.95 | 318 pp.
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More than just a shoulder-padded punchline of the Reagan era, yuppies remade American society in ways that we’re still reckoning with today. In Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York, Dylan Gottlieb details the rise of young, mostly Ivy-educated bankers and lawyers who ushered in an era of financialization, rising inequality, and a “meritocratic” ethos that proved exploitative in different ways than the good-old-boy networks it replaced. As cities began to cater to yuppies as their best hope of urban revitalization, working-class residents were often forcibly displaced, and city leaders reorganized city life around yuppie interests like exclusive dining and marathon running. These “consummate entrepreneurs of the self” engineered neoliberalism, and today’s “knowledge workers” are their inheritors.
Yuppies
The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York
Dylan Gottlieb
Harvard University Press
$32 | 352 pp.
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A lot happens when we read the Bible—or, the “objects we call bibles,” whose usually single, printed volumes comprise translations of dozens of texts originally written by different ancient authors, in different ancient languages, for different communities with differing theological beliefs. Any attempt to extract a unitary or authoritative moral message—however sincerely intended—inevitably fails. But that’s actually a good thing, argues David Dault in his provocative, intellectually stimulating work. Far too often, for too many of us, bibles serve as mere “accessories,” objects that do little to alter our selfish inclinations. Worse, they can become actual accomplices of violence—unless we allow ourselves to “misread” them, and thereby open ourselves to new kinds of liberatory, life-giving messages unlike any we’ve read before.
The Accessorized Bible
David Dault
Yale University Press
$30 | 256 pp.
